The following relates generally to wireless communication, and more specifically to decoupled transmissions of channel quality feedback and acknowledgement/negative-acknowledgement (ACK/NACK) feedback.
Wireless communication systems are widely deployed to provide various types of communication content such as voice, video, packet data, messaging, broadcast, and so on. These systems may be capable of supporting communication with multiple users by sharing the available system resources (e.g., time, frequency, and power). Examples of such multiple-access systems include code division multiple access (CDMA) systems, time division multiple access (TDMA) systems, frequency division multiple access (FDMA) systems, and orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems, (e.g., a Long Term Evolution (LTE) system). A wireless multiple-access communication system may include a number of base stations, each simultaneously supporting communication for multiple communication devices, which may be otherwise known as user equipment (UE).
When communicating with a UE, a base station may adapt the parameters of transmissions over a communication link (or link, or channel) between the base station and UE. The adapted parameters may include, for example, a modulation and coding scheme (MCS), a rank indicator (RI), or a pre-coding matrix indicator (PMI). In an LTE system, link adaptation may be based on ACK/NACK feedback transmitted by a UE to a base station in accordance with one or more hybrid automatic repeat request (HARD) processes, or on channel quality information (CQI) reports transmitted with ACK/NACK feedback.